New American Songbook

Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music you missed”. It’s easy to become insecure-- the absence of familiar names on the list could indicate your once cool and edgy tastes becoming irrelevant. Worse, unfamiliarity with the current fashion in music could be a symptom of ossifying preferences: not just becoming out of touch, but becoming set in ways. A web search for “best hip hop

Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a cultural malady of the same sort as the uselessly iterative paintings of Thomas Kincaid, or the entirety of the Oriental Trading Company catalog. It’s just capitalist overproduction and we’d be far better without it. So you’d think it might follow that the recent release of "The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon" would be easy for me to dismiss. The

Chicago emcee Mick Jenkins has been at the top of my favorite list since his debut release, "Water[s]." He’s a highly competent rapper and musician, but more importantly, he’s a fantastic writer. His latest release, called "Pieces of a Man," is maybe his most literary composition. He takes the title from a Gil-Scott Heron piece and, in case you didn’t catch that association, he includes two skits of spoken word work, complete with a backing jazz band, just to make it a little more obvious.

The new album from Vince Staples, ‘FM!’, picks up pretty much where he left off three albums ago with ‘Summertime ‘06’. Back then, summer was a malevolent season, at times even Lovecraftian--the heat of the season was an alien occupation, inspiring desperate acts. On ‘FM!’, a kind of truce has been achieved. Summertime and its corresponding themes aren’t quite as hostile, and while Staples’ narrative continues to brilliantly interweave abject tragedy with humor and moments of credible humanity,

The debut novel from Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give , takes its title from an extemporaneous monologue delivered by rap icon Tupac Shakur. In it, he expands his interpretation of gangsta rap’s main trope: the criminal and revolutionary identity he calls ‘thug life’. As he sees it, thug life is a response to the inherent racism and classism of American politics and culture. The novel explores this concept over the course of the plot, which centers on a police shooting witnessed by the protagonist,